Holmes: The war we’d rather ignore

Americans were not celebrating on Tuesday, the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. No cakes, no parties, no parades. Truth be told, we’d really rather not talk about it.

By Rick Holmes

Wayne Post

By Rick Holmes

Posted Mar. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Mar 21, 2013 at 9:17 PM

By Rick Holmes

Posted Mar. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Mar 21, 2013 at 9:17 PM

Americans were not celebrating on Tuesday, the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. No cakes, no parties, no parades. Truth be told, we’d really rather not talk about it.

But anniversaries are a good reason to remember bad things as well as good, and the invasion of Iraq, along with the politics that came before and the disasters that followed, should never be forgotten.

The invasion was launched from a platform of lies doled out by members of an administration bent on war and amplified by media that had been cheerleading for the U.S.A. since 9/11 and had mostly stopped asking tough questions. Saddam Hussein had acquired aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges, the White House said. He had sought to acquire yellowcake uranium from Africa. He had built mobile biological weapons labs. He had helped train al-Qaida terrorists.

Secretary of State Colin Powell used those tales at the United Nations, declaring to the world that Iraq possessed terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction. President George W. Bush used them in his State of the Union speech, warning that Hussein would give them to terrorists who would make 9/11 look like a walk in the park.

There was no doubt about the intelligence, they said.

But there was plenty of doubt. Government nuclear experts knew the aluminum tubes were for rockets, not centrifuges. The CIA knew the yellowcake document was forged and that the mobile weapons story came from a detainee in Germany they considered a fabricator. The alleged al-Qaida connection was based on a flimsy tale told by a detainee after he was tortured in Egypt.

There were no WMD in Iraq and no programs to make them, the government concluded a year and a half after the invasion. Nor were there ties to al-Qaida.

Call them lies, call them mistruths or call them the worst intelligence failure in the nation’s history. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s top aide at the State Department, now concedes that they “perpetuated a hoax.”

It was a hoax that came wrapped in the flag. Congress approved the action in October, three weeks before the 2002 election, and didn’t debate it again.

Not that there wasn’t dissent. People took to the streets, in cities around the world, in record numbers. Ted Kennedy, Al Gore and other leaders passionately argued against the invasion. But their voices were muted in the media and ignored in the White House.

Beyond the lies was wishful thinking. We’d be welcomed as liberators, said Vice President Dick Cheney. The war would be over quickly and would pay for itself, said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After Saddam, Iraq would become a valuable ally, a beacon of democracy and a bulwark against Iran.

The reality was a different story. We were greeted with riots and looting, which degenerated into an insurgency, which degenerated into years of civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites. Today, Iraq’s unstable government is far from democratic, and is more strongly allied with Iran than with the U.S.

Page 2 of 2 - Rumsfeld was so determined to get out of Iraq quickly that he refused to allow the Pentagon to plan for an occupation and kept those who had been working on post-Saddam planning at the State Department from boarding planes to Baghdad.

The display of incompetence that followed would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. The part of Iraq’s infrastructure that survived the “shock and awe” American air campaign was looted by Iraqis. Its educated professionals were fired by J. Paul Bremer’s occupation regime and targeted by insurgents.

America threw money at the problem – millions in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, stored in foot-lockers and filing cabinets, doled out with minimal record-keeping. Years later, the Special Inspector General’s report estimated at least $8 billion was stolen or wasted, calling Iraq under the occupation authority a “free fraud zone.”

The rosiest Pentagon estimates put the cost of the Iraq War at $1 trillion. A book on the subject by Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, which includes the long-range cost of caring for the war’s wounded, puts it above $3 trillion. And remember, all you who see federal debt as the nation’s paramount crisis: Every penny of that $3 trillion was borrowed.

You can’t put a pricetag on the loss of a loved one. The Pentagon counts 4,486 U.S. troops killed in Iraq. Its tally of 32,226 wounded is widely challenged because it doesn’t count the thousands of troops afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder and other lingering effects of a war that left few who touched it unscarred.

Estimates of Iraqi deaths range from 110,000 to 1,033,000, most of them civilians. The number of wounded and displaced Iraqis is too large for a reliable count.

Americans would rather not talk about it. After the last U.S. troops left Iraq in December 2011, the Pentagon even discouraged parades celebrating the end of the conflict and the heroism of those who fought there.

From a distance of 10 years, it’s ever easier to see the Iraq war as a fiasco, launched on a hoax, waged without a plan for how it would come out, a tragic waste of lives, treasure and American prestige.

But to this day, George W. Bush and the people responsible for this unnecessary war refuse to apologize. Those in politics and the press who cheered them on would rather change the subject.

That multiplies the error, because a nation that doesn’t remember doesn’t learn from its mistakes.